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Julia B. Levine was born in New York City and grew up in Flint, Michigan. She received an MFA from Pacific University and a PhD from UC Berkeley.
Levine is the author of Ordinary Psalms (LSU Press, 2021); Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU press, 2014), winner of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry; Ditch-tender (University of Tampa Press, 2007); Ask (University of Tampa, 2003), winner of the Tampa Review Prize; and Practicing for Heaven (Anhinga Press, 1991), winner of the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry, as well as the recipient of a bronze medal from Foreword magazine.
The recipient of several honors, including the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry, the Bellevue Literary Review Poetry Prize, a Discovery / The Nation prize, as well as others, Levine lives in Davis, California, where she serves as the current poet laureate. In 2022, Levine received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship
In 2022, Julia B. Levine was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Levine has created a program for middle school students to express their climate concerns in small groups, listen to scientists from University of California, Davis talk about solutions, and read and write their own poetry in response to climate change. A selection of these poems will be recorded by the teen authors and installed with geo-locating technology along a bike path that Davis youth utilize daily. This Sound River will be available to anyone with a mobile phone on the path. The Design Tech Lab at American River College will assist with Levine’s fellowship project.